The Origins of Autocracy

The Government of Compromise understood that its life was at stake. For if even later historians knew that "in almost all of the major confrontations with Western opponents on an open field the Mus­covite troops lost," this must have been all the more striking to the participants in these confrontations. And they could by no means be consoled by abstract considerations to the effect that their tsar was preparing to demonstrate his penetrating genius to posterity. For them the "turn on the Germans" meant, quite simply, disaster. And there is a reason to think that the tsar, too, understood this perfectly. Even in the years of the Oprichnina, he exclaimed in a letter to Kurb­skii: "How can I not remember the endless objections of the priest Sil'­vestr, of Aleksei [Adashev], and of all of you to the campaign against the German cities. . . . How many reproachful words we heard . . . from you, there is no need to recount in detail!" Further on, the tsar frankly admits: "Whatever bad thing happened to us,

it was all became of the Germans" (he is speaking of the bitter conflict and confrontation which had arisen in the government over his decision to "turn against the Germans").

Apparently the government was trying to present the tsar with a fait accompli: it began a war in the South as early as 1556 with the Crimean expedition of the d'iak

(civil servant, secretary) general Rzhevskii, who traveled down the Dnieper all the way to Ochakov, defeated the Tatars, seized their cattle and horses, and got away safely. The effect was electric. For the first time, the Tatars had been paid back in their own coin. Devlet Girei, who had been preparing to move against Moscow, immediately beat a retreat, and even agreed to release the Muscovite prisoners taken in the previous year's cam­paign. It was now that the tsar was "importuned and counselled . . . again and again" that the time had come for a new Ugra. But Ivan IV wanted to make war on Europe and not on the Tatars. And appar­ently he found strong allies in the Muscovite establishment, and per­haps in the government itself. At the begining of 1558, Adashev seems to have decided on a compromise: he tried to make war on two fronts. Despite the fact that, contrary to the traditional methods of Ivan III, no diplomatic or political preparations had been made for a war on Livonia, troops were dispatched against both Livonia and the Crimea.

After taking Narva, however, the Russian generals in Livonia halted their advance. "I had to send letters to you more than seven times before you finally took a small number of people and only after many reminders captured more than fifteen cities," Ivan the Terrible com­plained indignantly afterwards. "Is this a sign of your diligence, that you take cities after our letters and reminders, and not on your own initiative?"

[128] At the first opportunity, when the king of Denmark of­fered to act as intermediary, Adashev petitioned for a truce with Livonia and got it.³³

In the South, reminders and letters from the tsar were unneces­sary. The war developed spontaneously there, and new allies joined in unasked—the Cossacks, refugees from Central Russia who wan­dered over the endless "Wild Field" and spent their energies and en­terprise in banditry. Not only the Don Cossacks were involved. Hear­ing of the unexpected new prospects, the "chief of the Ukraine" and leader of the Dnieper Cossacks, Prince Dimitrii Ivanovich Vishnevet- skii made an appeal to the tsar, declaring that he would be willing to repudiate his oath to Lithuania and enter Ivan's service if he were al­lowed to lead the Crimean campaign. A chain reaction developed. Not even waiting for the tsar's approval (he would never receive it), Vishnevetskii took the Tatar city of Islam-Kermen' by storm, and car­ried off its cannons to the camp which he had built on the island of Khortitsa in the Dnieper. Two Circassian princes in the service of Muscovy took two more Tatar cities, and the khan proved powerless to recover them. His attempt to storm Khortitsa ended, in S. M. Solov'ev's words, with his "being forced to retreat with great shame and loss."³⁴ In the spring of 1559, at the very moment of the truce with Livonia, Danilo Adashev, Aleksei's brother, seized two Turkish ships at the mouth of the Dnieper, made a landing in the Crimea, laid waste the settlements, and freed the Russian prisoners—and again the khan was unable to do anything about it.³⁵